You’re right. That’s a huge part of the problem. It’s only clear after repeated attempts to build anything past that. This product is frequently overpromising and under delivering to a user base with low technical skill in app development, which can’t see this as quickly.
For example, your email verification tutorial posted above is totally not a secure implementation, but you didn’t know that till now, I didn’t know that untill this past year, maybe largely because adalo actually suggests doing it that way.
People are trying to build their companies and future lives on this product that actually does dangerous things, including suggesting insecure and easily circumventable approaches, ignores best practices, and directly answering community questions about stripe component compliance, saying that it is compliant when that is barely relevant because the app you build itself must be compliant and never will be on current stack but that is not disclosed.
In that last case the app distributor would be responsible for the hefty fines, not adalo, but also no one has been educated about the risks of using the tools they are being given.
So I feel the whole thing is dangerous at this point.
And even though people may not explicitly know these things they are catching on to the fact that things are off.
And in terms of stress I can’t help but notice I enjoy building in most platforms but lately, 15 minutes into using adalo I am almost always feeling grumpy.
The list of things i would guess adalo needs to do to succeed and probably to stay alive is almost certainly something like:
- make it to their next round which would be due any time now by my guess
- start teaching users to do things responsibly (though they may genuinely lack the dev leadership here, just a hunch, can’t tell for sure)
- make a product that does what they say or otherwise say what it can actually do
- massive increase in editor and server reliability
*that prev probably requires a massive devops overhaul and I’d almost bet would be easier for a new product than adalo as they are now.
Just some guesses.